Sunday, 22 November 2015

Disclosure: Jude Rogers –
freelance writer extraordinaire and wife of The Drink's drummer
Daniel Fordham – was involved in the Smoke: A London Peculiar
website, which published some of my work.

~

The Drink - Capital

Listening
to Capital - The
second album by London-based, dark-folk oddity, The Drink
- reminded me of the early 1980s, when indie music seemed to
occupy a strange parallel dimension, adjacent to what was going on in
the mainstream.

In this pre-internet age, left-field bands, cocooned
in their own worlds, on the periphery of the British music scene,
hoved haphazardly in and out of my orbit: Momentarily blinking into
existence on FM radio waves, via a John Peel Session; read about in
small articles in one of the weekly music papers, but perhaps never
heard; occasionally granted a flicker of wider exposure in the form
of an incomplete, context-free snippet from a chorus, accompanying a
still, black and white photo, during the Indie Top 10 singles
countdown on The Chart Show.

The Drink draw on
the spirit of this era, along with countless historical DIY efforts
to recalibrate pop music according to some alternative template.
There is a sense of a band going their own way; who, at times, seem
lost in a sea fog between the algorithmic structures of American post
rock, and a kind of far-flung, Anglicised island folk music.

The spindly guitar that methodically works itself into complicated
shapes, as if negotiating the twists and turns of an intricate,
blackboard-bound mathematical formula, doesn't so much provide
structure to these songs as it does define their outer limits. There
are moments on Capital
when it sounds like a
less scattered approximation of the dexterous Congolese Soukous style
of finger picking - a technique that, in sub-Saharan climes, showers
the listener with peels of warm notes. Relocated several lines of
latitude to the north, these exotic chord structures shake off some
of their equatorial looseness, gaining angles and, during the
advancing mantra of The Coming Rain, a
purposeful forward momentum: It's a song that skips about on an undulating African rhythm, tethered to
a vocal that multi-tracks partway through, affecting a slow dissolve
into a false ending, before picking up again where it left off.

The
ten tracks here are unusually detailed in their construction, with some
deliberately unbalanced or marginally out of tune. This makes them
intriguing but difficult to fathom on early listens. The wilfully
off-kilterHair
Trigger issonically
equivalent to one of
those gravity-defying modern skyscrapers that look like they might
fall down at any moment – a fidgety, a-melodic rhythm that jumps
back and forth, or hangs on the spot, while the drummer attempts to
lay down a stabilising beat underneath.

Potter's
Grave – another peculiarity that seems to have been
meticulously pieced together from a grab-bag of ideas – is built
around an intricately looping guitar that assumes a holding pattern
during the lead-in to the chorus.

Adding fluidity to this
cat's cradle of sound, with its zigzagging advances and retreats, is
Dearbhla Minogue, whose untutored vocals float around the higher
registers and recall front-women like Rosie Cuckston (Pram)
and Alison Statton (Young Marble Giants). Unlike Cuckston, who
was happy for her voice to crack as she strained for the top notes,
Minogue stays within the limits of her range. It's a style in keeping
with the overall approach of the band, who
will meticulously explore the outer limits of a musical idea, but in
a very controlled, restrained and methodical manner.

Capital is
an album of curiosities; odd lines that rise from a sea of
lyrical abstraction, such as the oft-repeated “If
you do well in school I'll take yah to the swimming pool” on
Potter's Grave.

I'll
Never Make You Cry simulates walking in on a 1960s girl group, in the early stages of demoing a version of a much bigger song, with place-holder lyrics and
a ponderous bookmark of an instrumental break. This non-traditional,
approach to vocal downtime is repeated on Hair
Trigger with its
sketchy, negative image of a guitar solo, absent power chords.

The
Drink tread a
fine line, carefully micro-managing their sound, but stopping short of allowing these underlying complexities to get in
the way of the songs. On Capital there are
moments of genuine tension and atmosphere. The ominous organ drone
and guitar creep that opens No Memory has the air of a
developing off-shore weather system. It's a song that carries itself
forward, rising and falling on slow-building swells. The drawn-out
coda, ghosted by stray backing vocals, peters out before it can fade
away, as if the band who have thrown so many ideas into this album,
in its final seconds finally ran out of notes to play.

Sunday, 1 November 2015

Earlier this year, the
Californian band - Wand - released their second album.

Titled Golem, it
was a recordthat
staked out a camp on the fringes Stoner Rock territory with its
fusion of metal and psychedelia.

Wand's third long-player -
1000 Days - is a far lighter and nimbler record than its
predecessor, comprising 12 short songs, all cut from the same cloth,
that draw upon the US garage-band psychedelia of the 1960s and early
70s, and its folkier, whimsical English counterpart.

As a band who have
released two albums in 2015, Wand work quickly. The songs on 1000
Days all sound young and light on their feet, unburdened by any
traces of over-thinking that might have drained their vitality.

The opener - Grave
Robber - which, on the basis of the title alone, one would peg as
a monolithic slab of plodding doom metal, comes racing out of traps
on a panel-beaten metallic whoosh of indeterminate origins. It's an
encouraging mark of quality psychedelia when you can't pin down the
instrument that is source of the peculiar noises that are ricocheting
around on the periphery of the mix.

Elsewhere, a cymbal
dissolves into a boiling gaseous cloud; a meandering electronic
keyboard note, accompanied by underlying chirps and burbles, is
carried along on jangly rhythm guitar, and the song moves ahead of
itself with such urgency that it barely pauses for its middle eight.

The acid-drenched 1960s
vibe that infuses every nook and cranny of 1000 Days could leave a
listener with the impression that their brain architecture is slowly
reconfiguring itself into a mandala:

Passage of a Dream
incorporates drawn-out
guitar swan-dives, like the engine of a small jet aircraft on a steep
controlled descent, prior to dissolving into metallic cacophony.

Lower Order's
opening - a heavily compressed bass that mimics an over-revved
motorcycle engine - lingers as a sustained note throughout the song:
A relentless churning groove that, following a splintered guitar solo
and some magisterial keyboards, changes in tone, warping over on itself
to show off different facets of the same raw material.

The
album highpoint - Sleepy Dog – a song with its eyes
fixed upon the heavens, offers the grandest of false endings: A
staggered bass and guitar climb-down from a chorus trailing
interstellar synths, that segues into a spaced-out, instrumental false
coda. This is followed by some scampering drum fills as if the rhythm
section is attempting to regain traction, and then one final chorus
that devolves into a squalling power chord.

Situated on the album's
most far-out extremities (otherwise known as track 5), the
instrumental interlude, Dovetail, is a drumming circle
consisting of hollow vessels, lacking any bottom end, and more solid
percussion, ghosted by phantom strafed beats on the verge of being
smudged out of existence; all of it set against a heavily-distorted
single note that sounds like it's in the process of being
stretched-out in a wind tunnel.

The record's acoustic
moments often pre-empt the arrival of heavier material. Broken Sun
begins as head-nodding campfire music - a bassline that creaks like
somebody rubbing wrinkles into the surface tension of a slightly over
inflated balloon. By the midpoint it has utterly transformed into a
ponderous heavy metal beast that recalls Black Sabbath, with
an increasingly stroppy whinnying guitar solo that struggles to
wrench itself free from the restraints of rhythm section.

There are gentler moments,
such as the title track whose opening line “Ceement boy and Ceement
girl walking alone in the sunlight” recalls the pastoral Arcadian
whimsy of Robyn Hitchcock, as does the closing song Morning Rainbow
- a gentle acoustic paean to Lucifer with lyrics that suggest an
olive branch offered by the creator to his favourite fallen angel;
the ominous parting words: “We will see the world together in it's
terror.”

With nary a pause between
the end of one track and the beginning of the next, 1000 Days
is a breathless journey, lasting 33 minutes, but with enough ideas to
fill an album of double the running time.